Against Meritocracy

In this book Jo Littler argues that meritocracy is the key cultural means of legitimation for contemporary neoliberal culture – and that whilst it promises opportunity, it in fact creates new forms of social division. Against Meritocracy is split into two parts. Part I explores the genealogies of meritocracy within social theory, political discourse and working cultures. It traces the dramatic U-turn in meritocracy’s meaning, from socialist slur to a contemporary ideal of how a society should be organised. Part II uses a series of case studies to analyse the cultural pull of popular ‘parables of progress’, from reality TV to the super-rich and celebrity CEOs, from social media controversies to the rise of the ‘mumpreneur’. Paying special attention to the role of gender, ‘race’ and class, this book provides new conceptualisations of the meaning of meritocracy in contemporary culture and society

Levelling down: roundtable on Boris Johnson

A discussion of the nature of Johnson’s ‘cake-ism’, and the long-term structural and ideological shifts reshaping the Conservative Party, in response to Robert Saunders’s essay in this issue, ‘Let Them Eat Cake’: Conservatism in the age of Boris Johnson’. This text is based on contributions to a Renewal roundtable that took place on 4 April 2022

Book review: The return of inequality: social change and the weight of the past by Mike Savage

In The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past, Mike Savage explores how inequality has surfaced as a pressing cause for concern over the past decade, offering an ambitious interdisciplinary re-theorisation of inequality and bringing a historical understanding to the table. Its deeply contextual approach, theoretical breadth and historical consciousness make this hugely generative book a major contribution to understanding inequality today, writes Jo Littler. The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past. Mike Savage. Harvard University Press. 2021

The university: caring community or carewashing central? Autosociobiographical reflections

This paper offers a small slice of ‘autosociobiography’: autobiographical reflections which situate these impressions in a wider social context (Ernaux 2022, Jaquet 2023, Twellman and Lammers 2023). These particular autosociobiographical reflections are about my experiences of university, and how they have offered both positive and sometimes more problematic forms of community. The first part of the article pursues this by considering the social contexts of my routes taken to university, narratives of social mobility, and the forces shaping higher education over that timeframe in the UK, in that particular geographical and social conjuncture. The second part of the article shifts its attention to the present day and considers the forms of ‘carewashing’ pushed by the contemporary university in the increasingly uncaring, and difficult, UK context of marketized higher education. It ends by considering the ‘micro’ and ‘meso’ forms of community and care which are today often used to attempt to cope with and survive such contexts, as well as the ‘macro’ changes discussed throughout the article that urgently needed to redress such ‘structural carelessness’. In the process, through these combined lenses, the article aims to consider relationships between care, community and ‘the university’

Book review: The return of inequality: social change and the weight of the past by Mike Savage

In The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past, Mike Savage explores how inequality has surfaced as a pressing cause for concern over the past decade, offering an ambitious interdisciplinary re-theorisation of inequality and bringing a historical understanding to the table. Its deeply contextual approach, theoretical breadth and historical consciousness make this hugely generative book a major contribution to understanding inequality today, writes Jo Littler. The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past. Mike Savage. Harvard University Press. 2021

The female entrepreneur: Fragments of a genealogy

This short article, based on a lecture, offers fragments for a genealogy of female entrepreneurship in the Global North. It argues that in business and management books and social texts, the entrepreneur has historically been overwhelmingly figured as male – as ‘entrepreneurial man’. Yet, over the past few decades, encouraged by both gender mainstreaming and neoliberal feminism, the symbolic locus of entrepreneurialism in popular culture has increasingly gravitated towards women. It shows how we might trace a mediatised evolution of female entrepreneurialism and its ideologies: from tragic 1950s entrepreneurial stars, through to the plucky shoulder-padded heroines of women’s magazines and films of the 1980s, through to the girlbosses, Instagram entrepreneurs and hustle culture of the present. What, it asks, is happening to the female entrepreneur in an era of neoliberal crisis? And what ‘left feminist’ alternatives to, or intersections with, this figure might be in our midst, or on the horizon

Book review: The return of inequality: social change and the weight of the past by Mike Savage

In The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past, Mike Savage explores how inequality has surfaced as a pressing cause for concern over the past decade, offering an ambitious interdisciplinary re-theorisation of inequality and bringing a historical understanding to the table. Its deeply contextual approach, theoretical breadth and historical consciousness make this hugely generative book a major contribution to understanding inequality today, writes Jo Littler. The Return of Inequality: Social Change and the Weight of the Past. Mike Savage. Harvard University Press. 2021

Feminism and Childcare: A Roundtable with Sara de Benedictis, Gideon Burrows, Tracey Jensen, Jill Rutter and Victoria Showunmi

This is an edited transcript of a roundtable event held at City University London in late 2014.1 The point of this seminar was to ask: what progress have we made towards men and women equally sharing the childcare? Rearranging the domestic division of labour was a crucial issue foregrounded by second-wave feminism: but how much progress has actually been made since then

Beyond anti-welfarism and feminist social media mud-slinging: Jo Littler interviews Angela McRobbie

In this wide-ranging interview, which took place in spring 2021, Angela McRobbie talks about her work in relation to social politics, the contemporary conjuncture, cultural studies, decolonisation and feminism. Beginning with a discussion on her experience of Covid, it contextualises these reflections through a discussion of anti-welfarism and the scapegoating of dependency, drawing from her new book Feminism and the Politics of Resilience. It moves on to discuss different forms and experiences of feminism: including the neoliberal Anglo-German academic context; the legacies of queer theory and radical feminism; the ‘mud-slinging’ of social media which ‘does not allow us the time and space to rehearse what is really going on’; the need to engage with social policy alongside cultural theory; and the ongoing intersectional work of rewriting the curriculum

‘Roundtable: An Intergenerational Feminist Media Studies?’ with Rosalind Gill, Hannah Hamad, Mariam Kauser, Diane Negra and Nayomi Roshini

This is the edited text of a roundtable held at City University London, UK in November 2014, organised by Alison Winch and Jo Littler. The event aimed to pay attention to the ways in which age and generation shape mediated conversation about feminist politics: to problematise the dominant media representations of intergenerational “cat fights,” or feminist bickering, while simultaneously interrogating the ways in which mediated conflicts and connections shape the potential to work together to enact feminist social change. It therefore aimed to explore a number of different questions in relation to this issue, including: what kind of shared conversations do women have across age groups, and how do these circulate in media cultures? How can intergenerational alliances be built while still remaining sensitive to differences of experience? How are feminist connections being formed by digital media, technology, and platforms? How is feminist conflict mediated, and how might it operate productively